


Getting Together (Again)

by Magik3



Series: Katyana Future Middle-Age [1]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:17:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11817228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magik3/pseuds/Magik3
Summary: Twenty years after being together as teens, can Kitty and Illyana work through their complicated history to find their way back to each other?





	1. Cosmic Background

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly in third-person from Kitty's point of view, with bits of Illyana in first person. Also this assumes that when Illyana as a teen threw her soulsword into Limbo to stop the demon invasion, and appeared to turn back into a kid, she actually threw most of herself into Limbo.

In the midst of the fight, Kitty saw how trapped they were between the alien zombie creatures and the cliff face. She yelled, “Illyana, stop hitting things! For a minute, just stop! All you do is hit things and we need to think!”  
  
She hadn’t meant to say all that, not that last part, but the last months, years, it had all been smalltalk and cheerful banter and nothing real. It grated on her, not always consciously.  
  
Illyana lowered her sword. Her hair was matted with sweat, bangs slicked to her forehead. “That’s not all I do. It’s all you see me do. Do you really think …” she stopped, rubbed her face, said, “Nevermind, what’s your genius brain coming up with now?”  
  
“If you can teleport us to the top of those cliffs—“  
  
“Kitty, if I could do that, I would have already done it! Gods, do you think I’m stupid just because I also like to hit things? I’m doing what can be done here!” Illyana’s voice rose until she was shouting.  
  
“Oh.” Kitty blinked at her. “You never used to yell at me.”  
  
“When we were kids, I tried never to yell. I didn’t trust myself.”  
  
“I’m kind of glad you do.”  
  
“Trust or yell?” Illyana asked.  
  
“Maybe both? Could you hit the things over there? If we get through, I think we could climb up and get a signal through.”  
  
They made it to the cliffs and up them, got their signal out. Help arrived. It looked good for a few minutes. Kitty was even thinking about what she wanted for dinner, but deliberately not thinking about who she wanted to have dinner with.  
  
An alien presence pressed into her mind. It rolled over her thoughts, working to crush her out of her own brain. She’d phased through most of the battle, but now she flinched away from the mind, phased too hard, as if she could phase away the presence.  
  
The world fell away.  
  
In her nightmares of this, it happened so fast: the world slipped away like tripping down stairs, like a rug pulled out from under. But this was almost leisurely. Give or take, her home was leaving her behind at a rate of 1.3 million mph, but it was so big that it seemed slow. The Earth rolled away from her, like a boat leaving an island, stranding her.  
  
She reached for her radio, but phased she couldn’t use it. Tried calling out in her mind for Rachel Grey or Emma Frost or anyone. For an instant, she felt Rachel reaching toward her, trying to tell her something that sounded weirdly like, “Relax.” That was the last thing she’d do in this situation.  
  
In the past, she’d always been able to phase through some things without phasing through everything. Phase through a wall and not the floor. Theoretically, it was possible that she could phase through everything, become the one motionless thing in the universe as everything passed through her—but she’d prayed it would never happen.  
  
A part of her wondered if she was moving at the same speed as the cosmic background radiation—the expanding universe itself—or somehow slower than that. Could she fall out of the universe? Into what?  
  
Phased, Kitty didn’t have to breathe, but she would never find her way home again. She watched with growing horror as the Earth and Moon together spun away from her. Far enough now to be recognized as their own microsystem within the solar system. She was rapidly becoming too far for Cerebra to track and moving perpendicular to the solar system. She’d drift in the vastness until she turned solid and died from the vacuum or simply faded to nothing.  
  
What would Illyana think if Kitty never made it back? The last things they’d said to each other had been yelling about yelling. Kitty wanted to go back and do that over, do so much over again differently. She wanted to think Illyana would miss her, but hadn’t they already lost each other so long ago?  
  
If Rachel knew she was out in space, she could at least alert people. Needle in a really huge haystack, though. Even if the Shi’ar sent ships with their best tracking devices, how would they know where to look for her? How long would it take to find her? If she passed out from exhaustion, would she unphase and die?  
  
The earth was tiny and the moon getting smaller and smaller. Kitty shut her eyes against the panic, the regrets and bitterness.  
  
Light flared against her eyelids. With her luck today, she was going to fall into the sun. Except, she was too far away for that.  
  
She opened her eyes to a curving arc of white-gold energy. This turned out to be part of a bubble encircling her and in the middle a pentagram with Illyana standing in it. Illyana with her jaw clenched, face pale and determined, hair shining in the light of the magic.  
  
“Found you,” Illyana said. “Want to go home?”  
  
“Yes, oh my gosh, yes!” Kitty threw her arms around Illyana, feeling herself slightly more solid than she had been. There was air in this glowing bubble and a hint of gravity. The galaxy wasn’t slipping away so fast now. “How did you unphase me?”  
  
“Long answer. Get more solid, let’s go. I don’t like space.”  
  
“It’s kind of beautiful when I’m not dying.”  
  
“Please, I really don’t like space.” Illyana said, her body shaking in her circle of Kitty’s arms.  
  
Now that she’d started going solid, Kitty could make herself more so. She held on to Illyana and felt the dizzy swirl of the teleport.  
  
They arrived in the entryway of the school. Kitty stepped back, even though she didn’t particularly want to.  
  
“How did you—?” Kitty started, but Illyana’s eyes were closed, her body dropped senseless on the ground.  
  
#  
  
Hank got her down to medical and said her metabolism was off. That was almost good news because Kitty didn’t like the idea of Illyana fainting from fear. But then after he started infusing and shaking his head about her numbers, it was really bad news. Kitty stayed by the bed, waiting.  
  
Illyana woke after an hour, saw Hank, gasped, “Kitty!” and tried to sit up.  
  
“Right here,” Kitty said and took her hand. “How are you?”  
  
Illyana’s eyes found her, focused slowly. She smiled and said, “It was so far.” And then she was out again.  
  
“I’ve already contacted Strange,” Hank said.  
  
Strange showed up two hours later in a flash of purple light. He had an amulet and fancy embroidered cloth that he draped over Illyana. She sighed and raised her hand to grip the amulet but her eyes didn’t open.  
  
“What happened?” Kitty asked. “She said it was far.”  
  
“Well then, it was. Where did she teleport from?”  
  
“I thought it didn’t matter. I mean, she moves in time and everything.”  
  
“She perceives distance differently, but that doesn’t mean it ceases to exist for her. She draws power from Limbo and, at least in her mind, Limbo intersects Earth. How far?”  
  
Kitty had calculated it after Illyana first said it had been far and said, “About 350,000 miles, I think.”  
  
“Forty times what she’s used to, even going from one side of the Earth to another. We’ll have to work on that. She should still be able to draw on the power of Limbo, not her body’s power. But she’ll regenerate. Let her sleep until she wakes naturally. She’ll bring back my artifacts. Good day.”  
  
#  
  
I woke sometime in the night. The lights had been turned down. I heard the hiss and beep of machinery. The weight of the amulet was still over my heart, warm and soothing. I’d felt it in my cells while I’d been out, kindling their ability to make power again. I’d burned out too much coming back. Strange would lecture me on that and then we’d get to work on how not to do that again.  
  
My left arm had the transfusing line in it, but my right hand was weighted down. I pushed my head to turn and look. Much harder than I wanted it to be.  
  
The weight was Kitty’s head. She’d fallen asleep with her cheek on the back of my hand. I moved my thumb, brushed the side of her skin. She mumbled and opened her eyes.  
  
“Hey, you’re up.”  
  
“Thank you for calling Dr. Strange.”  
  
“Hank said all the vitamins and electrolytes he was pumping into you weren’t doing the trick, so we figured we needed the magic big guns. Are you okay?”  
  
“I will be.” I sighed, looked at the ceiling and grinned. “It worked.”  
  
I felt amazingly good. Partly, for sure, the quantity of drugs Hank had pumped into my blood. Also that all this magic had done what I’d designed it to do. And that Kitty was safe and here and had fallen asleep at least a little bit on top of me.  
  
“Thank you,” Kitty breathed. A bit later, less quietly, “What did you do? How did you unphase me?”  
  
“I didn’t. That’s where I was off in trying to figure out how to do this. I spent a long time working on that. Never quite got it.”  
  
“How long have you been working on this?” she asked.  
  
My brain was very fuzzy. What had Hank given me? I had to ask, “How old are we now?”  
  
“Thirty-seven, if you’re still my age.”  
  
“Close enough,” I said. “I figured it out about three years ago, so about seventeen years. But the first twelve I was trying to figure out how to unphase you and that was a dead end.”  
  
“Seventeen … years?”  
  
“Not continuously. And at a certain point it was relaxing to work on it. I didn’t want to have to use it, but if it happened, I wanted to have it.” The words rolled out of me and Kitty watched, her eyes getting wider in a way that made me want to keep talking.  
  
I explained, “The breakthrough was when I realized that your phasing is strongly emotionally triggered, like my time teleports. When I don’t go where I intend it’s usually because of emotional factors I’m not conscious of—and when you phase unintentionally, same principle. You phase in a way that seems involuntary when you’re  afraid or surprised or startled. I figured that out because of sex, because you used to phase when I’d touch you but not when you touch yourself, because you weren’t surprising yourself … oh gods, how high am I right now?”  
  
“Hank said he gave you the good stuff,” she admitted. “Whatever that is, I’d say it’s pretty good.”  
  
“Don’t ask me anything you don’t want an answer to,” I drawled, hearing the slowness in my voice, the weight of the drugs. She shrugged and half-smiled, and I went on talking because of momentum and being way higher than I’d thought.  
  
“The greater the surprise, the more you phase. And I thought if you felt profoundly unsafe, kept feeling that way, you’d stay phased. So I didn’t have to unphase you, only make it so you felt safe enough to begin to unphase yourself. Then I could bring you to safer place where you could complete the process.”  
  
“That’s really smart.”  
  
“Would’ve been if it hadn’t taken me ages to get to. One of these years, if you let me practice on you, I swear I’m going to figure out how to unphase you. Anyway, once I got that I only had to make you feel safe, the hard part was figuring out how to create an environment that could survive wherever you might be. I planned for Earth’s crust and Earth’s core and then for space. I was working on us surviving going through a star, but hadn’t quite gotten there, so it’s good we didn’t.”  
  
“You …” Kitty started and faltered, started again. “Seventeen years? Even when …”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“No. That’s not right. That’s not fair. And you weren’t alive that whole time, were you?”  
  
“Long story,” I said. “Sometimes I was more alive than anyone expected and other times … it’s a long story. Anyway, it was an interesting problem.”  
  
She pushed away from the side of the bed and walked to the wall, put a hand on it. “Honestly? After all this time, everything, you can say that to me?”  
  
“No, I needed you …” the words came out whispered and rough and too honest. I didn’t know how to finish the sentence with all the possible true things I had to say.  
  
Kitty didn’t turn back to me. “You killed yourself,” she said.  
  
“I thought it would save all of you.” I wanted to argue that I hadn’t actually died, but neither of us had known that at the time. All the way back at eighteen, I’d been willing to die.  
  
“Not me,” she whispered. “I had to pretend to be happy that we had this kid version of you back. Try to be all joyful with Peter and his snowflake. And I was heartbroken. I was eighteen and gutted. Because you weren’t just gone. You did it. You killed yourself. So selfish and fucked up and did you even think about me?”  
  
“You were safer without me.”  
  
“No. I wasn’t. I was not one bit safer without you. I was just alone. Abandoned, lost. The one person I shared everything with—and I couldn’t even grieve right because now there was this kid. And because the person who killed the person I loved was also you. And then, on top of all of that, before I’d even worked it all out, I had to watch you die again as a little kid.”  
  
“I thought what happened to me didn’t matter—“ I said through the exhaustion dragging me down.  
  
“It mattered to me!” she said, low but anguished and I thought she was crying with her back to me, leaning her forehead against the wall.  
  
“I was wrong. By the time I realized it, it was much too late. I should’ve … there were better ways than what I did. I wish I could’ve learned what I needed to some other way.”  
  
“What was that first part again?”  
  
“I was wrong. I’m sorry.” The drugs and weariness and emotions were pulling me under again. I think I managed to say, “I’m sorry,” one more time before I passed back into semi-consciousness. When I woke again, Kitty was gone.  
  
I wanted to keep talking but I couldn’t. What could I say after all the years? What could I say to her anger at me for being willing to die? And then the weight of my anger—she’d gone back to Piotr, twice. She’d been one of the ones willing to lock me in the X-Brig and think the worst of me.  
  
When we’d been kids, she always defended me. I couldn’t lose any more of her than I already had, couldn’t talk to her and have her walk away from me or I would have to leave the school and maybe this dimension for a very long time.  
  
I’m only strong until I’m not. If I don’t have a safe place to go back to, no matter how small, if that’s gone … I could make a safe place for Kitty, but I didn’t trust she could make one for me. Not yet. When I was up and around again, we went back to friends, to surfaces and smalltalk and shopping. And I told myself that had to be enough.


	2. Start Tomorrow Today

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Twenty years of history is a lot to work through. Sometimes you need a little nudge ... from the future.

Kitty didn’t know what Illyana’s “I’m sorry” had been in response to. Everything? Or just passing out again in the middle of a conversation—after she’d spend seventeen years figuring out how to magically save Kitty from the worst possible scenario.  
  
Across Kitty’s life, she’d had so many people try to save her when it wasn’t necessary, want to save her, be idiots about saving her, think that she needed to be saved so she’d love them or at least sleep with them—all the time not know what she really needed or how to give it. And that whole time Illyana with her infuriating persistence, her flat demeanor, her manipulations and her stubbornness about doing whatever the fuck she wanted, the whole time Illyana had been steadily working on one pure, clear thing Kitty actually needed.  
  
For seventeen years, ending three years ago. That is, from around the time Kitty thought Illyana had died. And now she said she hadn’t really been dead and had been wrong about … how much?  
  
Kitty resolved to talk to her as soon as she could figure out where to start again, but that was so much easier with Illyana drugged and chatty in medical. She was working through her pile of paperwork, while in the back of her mind listing and discarding ways to start a conversation.  
  
A flash of blue and white announced Illyana’s teleport into her office.  
  
“You couldn’t just walk across campus?” Kitty asked. Annoyed that they hadn’t talked, hadn’t been talking, should’ve been, but hadn’t. For weeks that had turned into months and now it was this whole weight of awkward history and not saying anything—and she did not have a good plan for where to start.  
  
Illyana, smirking, looking very bright and happy and hot in a supremely well-shaped leather jacket, sat on the edge of Kitty’s desk, leaning in. “Nope,” she said.  
  
Kitty pushed the paperwork away and focused on Illyana. “That jacket is amazing. When did you get it?”  
  
And not just the jacket, Illyana had her hair up in a messy topknot bun that went great with her bangs. When had she started doing that?  
  
Illyana shrugged, grinned. “Depends. What day is today?” She didn’t wait for Kitty to answer, reached across and lifted Kitty’s cell phone, looked at it and nodded. “Good. What are you doing tonight?”  
  
“More paperwork.” Kitty tried not to smile. She liked this new, flirty, bold Illyana, but wasn’t quite ready to let that show.  
  
“We should go out. Get dinner. Talk about things.”  
  
“Okay, where?”  
  
“Pick it. And then I’m going to need you to do me a favor. Walk across campus and ask me to dinner.”  
  
That was not okay. “Whoever you have a bet going with, I don’t want any part of it,” Kitty said with returned and mounting annoyance. She turned back to her paperwork. “If you’re not serious, just get out.”  
  
“Katya, I am very serious and I very much want dinner with you, want to go out with you and see how good we are together. But right now, in this time, I am too … chickenshit to ask you.”  
  
Kitty looked at the jacket again, the sleekness of Illyana, the glow and brash and newness of her. Were there a few more lines around her eyes? Lines from grinning repeatedly over a period of years? Hard to tell with her hair up, but Kitty thought it was longer than it had been when Kitty saw her that morning.  
  
“You wouldn’t!” Kitty pushed up from her seat and glared. “You can’t risk screwing up the timeline just to ask me out. Tell me you didn’t come here from the future to ask me on a date!”  
  
Grinning, cocky, unapologetic Illyana—who Kitty was trying so hard not to like, said, “I did my research. You helped. No one walks into your office now. And the telepaths can’t read me. This is what happens. I come tell you that I’m too afraid to ask you out and then we go to dinner.”  
  
Kitty turned away from her desk and stared out the window, forcing herself not to turn around just to keep looking at a somewhat older, much happier Illyana.  
  
“We’re good together, huh?” Kitty asked.  
  
“Very.”  
  
“How long do I have to wait for that to happen? Because right now you’re being difficult.”  
  
Future Illyana moved behind her, touched her shoulder lightly. “I am very afraid in this time. You don’t know how afraid this has made me—you knowing how important you are to me. Well, now you do. And you know I can’t tell you anything about the future beyond tonight. But Katya, listen, I am sorry. I should’ve just talked to you after—there are so many times I should’ve just talked to you, but I didn’t know how you felt and you don’t know how much fear I had.”  
  
Kitty clenched her teeth and didn’t turn around. Because this was exactly what she had wanted and it did _not_ work at all that this was some other Illyana from a future where apparently she and Illyana were both stupid enough to fuck with the timestream for personal gain.  
  
Or maybe she just hated being told what to do. “What if I say no? I might stay here and do paperwork.”  
  
The fingers left her shoulder and Illyana said, “Your choice. The world won’t end. I have to go, Katya. Please ask me to dinner tonight. Give us a chance. Also, in the future, you’re the one who tells me when to come see you, so remember this.” She held Kitty’s phone where she could see it and tapped the face plate, the time: 12:43 p.m.  
  
And she was gone. Kitty stared at the empty space being furious and confused and weirdly happy. Only Illyana would be wild enough to pull this kind of stunt. Was it a time paradox if she asked out present day Illyana because she really liked future Illyana?  
  
“I hate being bossed around by future people,” she grumbled to the empty air.  
  
Did it screw up the timeline if she didn’t ask Illyana to dinner? Who could she ask if this was real? Not Illyana and not Dr. Strange. The beginning of a headache blossomed behind her eyes.  
  
She’d ask Hank. He was in his lab and told her to come down, so she did, swore him to secrecy and explained the problem. He laughed much, much longer than was polite.  
  
“Oh lord, that’s the best,” he finally said. “So now you don’t want to ask out current Illyana on principle, but you do want ask out future Illyana—if you can prove they’re the same Illyana. So the first question is: was that really Illyana?”  
  
“I think it was. She smelled like Illyana.” Kitty didn’t add: _and well-worn leather_. That was sort of a given and also not something she could say without blushing and stammering a lot. Leather had always been a top note that went really well with Illyana’s natural scent, and whatever cologne or perfume future Illyana had been wearing, blended all of that perfectly.  
  
Kitty had been trying not to think about how much she’d wanted to press her face against the side of Illyana’s neck, inside the collar of that jacket. Future Illyana, though.  
  
“Smell is the hardest part of most illusions,” Hank agreed. “I assume you’re wondering if you can safely not ask her out to dinner, but let me ask you this: what do you want?”  
  
“Well if future me and future Illyana thought it was important enough to send her back in time for this foolishness, then at some point we’re happy …”  
  
“No, Kitty, right now. What do you want?”  
  
She wanted Illyana, but without all the things that had happened. Without all the weight of the conversations they needed to have. She wanted it to be easy and it was not going to be. She wasn’t sure she had the fortitude to deal with how not-easy it was going to be. Maybe the past weeks and months it hadn’t just been Illyana avoiding her. Maybe seeing how much Illyana still cared, Kitty had also bolted.  
  
Was that why future-Kitty had sent future-Illyana to make her see how she felt? Oh, such a headache.  
  
Indigo smoke curled in the air and Kurt appeared in his uniform. “SHIELD’s saying ‘all hands,’ they’ve got a situation in Madripoor.”

That handled the dinner question. No one was going on a date if Madripoor was in mutant meltdown again.  
  
Kitty had the Shi’ar instant-uniform device she was testing embedded in her belt and hit it. This time it worked. Good thing since what happened last time she really didn’t want Hank and Kurt to see.  
  
“Let’s go,” she said.  
  
It was one of those clusterfucks where a bad batch of drugs had set two super-powered crime families against each other and the city was being wrecked. She, Hank and Kurt were part of the teams driving the fighting toward the beaches where SHIELD could do containment and make arrests. What could’ve been a fun fight was ruined by the rainy season. They had to do it all in a heavy downpour with the streets smelling like piss and rot. By the time they got to the beach, Kitty faced the gray ocean and gulped in air that only smelled of salt and rotting seaweed.  
  
A flash of blue-white light in the corner of her vision turned her attention. Illyana held bands of energy around a massive, muscle-bound creature.  
  
“Can we get a cage for this asshole?” she yelled at the SHIELD people and they scrambled.  
  
Once it was caged, Illyana walked down the beach to Kitty. Up close she smelled like wet leather and dissipating fury. “Good fight,” she said. “They’re wrapping up. You okay?”  
  
Kitty nodded, looked back over the water. There was a brightness in the east. The sun coming up. No dinner after all? Time paradox? Broken future or just broken heart?  
  
The sinking, spinning disappointment in her chest showed Kitty how much much she wanted that future, however far, however long it lasted—that shining, grinning Illyana, comfortable and laughing, flirting with her as an adult.  
  
“Want to get dinner?” she asked Illyana.  
  
Illyana jerked her chin toward the sunrise. “It’s morning.”  
  
“It’s night somewhere,” Kitty insisted.  
  
“Da, anywhere on the East Coast.”  
  
“Let’s go to Maine. I want seafood.”  
  
“I know a place. Shall I gather the others?” Illyana asked.  
  
“No, just you and me. Dinner date.”  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“Don’t you want to?”  
  
Illyana looked away down the beach and Kitty had a flash of anger until she remembered future-Illyana saying, “You don’t know how afraid this has made me.” It could be, the line of Illyana’s face turned away, the set of her shoulder, yes, that was how she stood when she was trying not to show fear.  
  
Kitty moved close enough that their arms touched. She said in a near whisper, “You showed up in my office today. From the future. You asked me to ask you out because, you said, you’re too chickenshit to ask in this time.”  
  
Illyana jumped and stared at Kitty. Kitty gave her the: _I am so fucking serious right now_ look until Illyana began laughing.  
  
Illyana wiped a hand across her eyes, clearing rainwater and confusion, and said, “Chickenshit. Yes, that sounds like me. How did I handle the … oh, I guess I’ll figure that out before I do it. I’m glad one of us knows what she’s doing. Remind me to buy myself something nice. I would love to have dinner with just you. If we go someplace a little fancy, do you have anything to wear?”  
  
Kitty touched her belt and was switched back to the outfit she’d been wearing that afternoon: pants, light sweater, light blazer. It was all soaked in an instant. Illyana clicked her tongue, about the rain or the outfit, Kitty couldn’t tell.  
  
They teleported, appearing in a city dimly lit with growing morning light. A street vendor was opening a cart selling fried bread, almost sugar donuts, but a version very far from American. “Is that Korean?” Kitty asked, pointed at the sign on the cart as Illyana bought them two.  
  
“Yes, come on.”  
  
“How do you have Korean currency?”  
  
“There are spells on my wallet to turn the money in the second compartment into whatever matches the country I’m in. Instant exchange,” she explained and tucked the wallet back into the top of her boot. Seeing Kitty’s look, she grinned. “You thought this should travel around in my cleavage? But I like a bigger wallet and it doesn’t fit, especially when the leather is wet.”  
  
Which had Kitty looking at Illyana’s cleavage and smelling the wet leather again, and thinking how dumpy she must look in her soaked professorial attire. They went to the end of the street, to a store that was still closed because it was early morning.  
  
“Phase us in?” Illyana asked. “I’ll leave money, no stealing.”  
  
Kitty took them through the door into a very cute, very upscale boutique. “Oh, this is adorable.”  
  
“Pick something for dinner. Nice but not formal, okay?”  
  
Kitty walked around the racks and a jacket collar caught her eye. The jacket she’d seen on Illyana that afternoon. Buttery soft leather, a standing half-collar. She held it up and said, “This is for you. You were wearing it this afternoon. Wow, that’s weird to think about.”  
  
Illyana ran her fingers along the jacket’s arm. “Fantastic. Should I find something for you then?”  
  
“Please do.” Kitty watched, thinking about how often they’d gone shopping as teens and the few times it had turned into something more than shopping. How easy it had been to be around Illyana then. Even with her demons. Maybe even because of them, because Illyana never judged her. She only ever judged herself. Illyana was worse on herself than anyone else could be—maybe she still was.  
  
Illyana had been moving dresses, pulling a few off a rack and hanging them where Kitty could see. The first was red and gray and gold in a traditional cut but a bold geometric pattern. The second had broad stripes: gray and black but then suddenly orange, followed by gray and orange. The third was … Kitty had to stare at it to make sense of it: shapes and stars: black and white and steel blue intersected with red and peach lines, big violet and gold stars. It shouldn’t have worked except for the conservative cut of the skirt, the neckline, the blazer with its oddly-wide lapels and sharp edges in navy blue held it all together.  
  
“That looks more like a superhero uniform than my actual uniform,” Kitty said.  
  
“You don’t like it?”  
  
“Oh, if you don’t buy it for me, I’m going to cry. It’s amazing.”  
  
“Go put it on. I’ll figure out the money.”  
  
Kitty went into the dressing room with a twinge of sadness that she was going alone. Her bra and panties were still on the damp side, but they’d dry fast enough. She slipped into the dress and jacket, shook out her hair and twisted it back, tying a messy bun with the band she’d used for her ponytail.  
  
Then she had to stare at herself in the mirror for a while. How could a dress and jacket with bright gold and violet stars make her look _more_ authoritative? From now on, this was her power suit for obnoxious committee meetings. It even went with her earrings. Had Illyana noticed her earrings and picked a dress to match?  
  
When she went back into the main room of the store, Illyana was leaning against the counter. A modest pile of bills sat next to the register with a note, weighted down by a stapler. Illyana had kept the boots of her uniform, but changed into dark gray skinny jeans, a black t-shirt with white Korean letters, and the leather jacket.  
  
She was becoming the Illyana that Kitty had seen in her office that afternoon and Kitty wanted to put her arms around Illyana’s body under the jacket. But they hadn’t even had dinner yet.  
  
“You look perfect,” Illyana said. “Let’s go eat.”  
  
They arrived late at night, down the street from a small restaurant that was also a private marina somewhere in Maine. A wall of glass looked out over the darkened harbor and the sleeping boats. They’d arrived late enough, an hour before closing, that they got a table by that wall-sized window. It was like eating out on the docks but with soft white table linens, a creamy table-cloth, perfectly sculpted dishes that tasted as good as they looked.  
  
“You bring all your dates here?” Kitty asked and immediately regretted it.  
  
“No. Piotr found this place. He …,” she trailed off, looking like she was feeling at least as much regret as Kitty.  
  
“He what?”  
  
“He loves it. He and Kurt and Storm have a boat here. I shouldn’t have … I’m sorry. We could leave.”  
  
“It’s okay.” Kitty took a long breath and made herself believe that. “It’s great. Rasputins have great taste.”  
  
Illyana smirked, chuckled, started laughing outright, spilled her water glass and both of them were laughing through the waiter’s hasty efforts to clean it all up.  
  
“So much has happened,” Illyana said quietly when the waiter was gone.  
  
“You know what, let’s not talk about it. Let’s start from now, for a while, let’s start over. Let’s pretend we met on the beach and I asked you to dinner and … something like that anyway.”  
  
Illyana’s face had gone from sad to surprised to lightly smiling while Kitty talked. She leaned forward and said, “I hear you’re a professor. What do you teach?”  
  
That opened up a festival of light-hearted complaining about classes and students and bureaucracy. Then they talked about movies, TV, books, clothing. They still had a fair amount in common and enough to disagree about without fighting: whether students should spend more time learning math or mythology; whether or not video games should be considered a sport; whether or not tiny ankle boots counted as boots; whether Illyana should be wearing a shirt that said in Korean “I don’t speak Korean” if she could by using translation spells.  
  
They ordered dessert just to have an excuse to sit longer and then walked on the docks. Kitty didn’t ask which boat Peter, Kurt and Storm owned, but she had her suspicions when she saw the name Parhelion on the hull of a small, tidy yacht.  
  
At the end of the dock, over the water, under the black, starry sky, Illyana asked, “Do I walk you home and then kiss you?”  
  
“I have a lot of housemates,” Kitty said. “So maybe here?”  
  
Kitty wrapped her fingers around one lapel of the jacket and Illyana grinned. She put her fingertips on the side of Kitty’s neck and brushed slowly up until her hand cupped the back of Kitty’s head. Her fingers were so hot they made Kitty dizzy. Or maybe that was the smell of cedar and amber and leather rising from her body.  
  
Illyana was slightly taller because of her boots, so Kitty’s face tipped up, met the soft, rough, bigger, warmer lips coming to meet hers. Pressed between Illyana’s fingers at the back of her head and her mouth, she was melting inside. She grabbed Illyana’s other lapel to keep her sense of up and down because gravity didn’t seem very accurate right now.    
  
They were both bigger than they’d been at seventeen. Kitty had the memory of their teenaged bodies with this moment superimposed on it. Illyana’s shoulders were wider and both of them had grown a little taller, but by the same amount so it balanced. Familiar and strange.  
  
She turned her face from lllyana’s mouth so she could press closer, wrap her arms around Illyana under the jacket and feel Illyana’s arms circle her, crush her close. Her face rested in the perfect shelter of Illyana’s hair, the jacket’s collar, the heat of Illyana’s neck against her cheek. Were they kids or adults or people from the future? Were they becoming the people she wanted to become?  
  
“I don’t know where we are,” she whispered.  
  
Illyana’s fingers brushed over her hair, lips moving beside her ear. “Home,” she said.  
  
They stood on the dock for a long time, leaned together. Kissing again, gentle, tentative, lips on lips and then lips on faces, on necks, on ears. Illyana giggled and Kitty’s fingers clenched around Illyana’s hip because it had been so very long since she’d heard that sound and she wanted everything.  
  
“We should go back,” Illyana said eventually, breathless, eyes very wide. Her boot scuffed the dock. “I don’t want splinters.”  
  
“Are you saying you’re weak in the knees?” Kitty grinned.  
  
“Very. Let me … walk you home.”  
  
“Please.”  
  
Kitty wrapped her fingers around Illyana’s hand and the blue-white magic took them back to the school.  
  
“I’d walk you to you room, but I’ll want to kiss you again and I don’t know if we want to tell people yet.”  
  
“You like sneaking around?” Kitty asked.  
  
Illyana dropped her hand and stepped away. “Katya, I have to go or … it’s a first date; I should go.”  
  
“Ilya, it was a great date. Thank you.”  
  
The grin flashed back onto Illyana’s face. “You haven’t called me Ilya in a long time. Can we do this again soon?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Kitty watched Illyana walk away, broad-shouldered, tough, but light in her stride. Head down slightly so her hair fell forward and Kitty could imagine the smile it was hiding.  
  
She phased up to her room. It was 2 a.m. and she had class at 9 a.m. Suck. But not that much suck because of this buoyant brightness inside her now. She didn’t want to go to sleep. After changing into her pajamas, she sat at her computer, looked at email and her notes for class.  
  
And she still didn’t want to go to sleep. Not here.  
  
She phased across campus to Illyana’s door and tapped on it. Illyana’s rough whisper carried through the thick wood, “Come in.”  
  
When Kitty phased through the door, she saw Illyana in her bed, on her back, arms folded behind her head. “You’re up?”  
  
“I am replaying the date so I’ll remember it all. What are you doing?”  
  
“I miss you.”  
  
Illyana sat up, the compressed smile on her lips that said she was happier than she could show. “You saw me an hour ago,” she teased, but she pulled the blanket and sheet back.  
  
She was in a t-shirt and soft, loose boxers, the muscles in her legs showing as she moved to make room. Kitty wasn’t sure she could climb into that bed and behave, but she wanted just that, just sleeping.  
  
“It was only our first date,” Kitty whispered.  
  
“I’ll be good,” Illyana said.  
  
As soon as Kitty was in the bed, feeling the warmth on the sheets from where Illyana’s body had been a moment before, and the heat radiating from Illyana, she started shaking.  
  
“Roll over,” Illyana told her.  
  
She turned on her side and Illyana spooned behind her, an arm thrown over her stomach.  
  
“Go to sleep, Katya. I’ll be good.” The words brushed warmly across her ear and she pressed back into Illyana’s body.  
  
“If you say that again, like that. I won’t be. And I have class in a few hours, so shush.”  
  
Illyana chuckled and sighed and seemed to go to sleep. Her breathing was slow and deep. Kitty let herself cry, silently, from happiness and grief, from relief and the so much of everything, until she fell asleep.


End file.
